The next Scientia colloquia will be Nov. 19 at 4 p.m. and will feature a set of five-minute talks by four faculty on the ideas that have most powerfully influenced or engaged them in their careers and intellectual lives.

The colloquium, which is free and open to the public, will be in Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium, with a reception afterward.

The speakers and their topics are:

–Casey O’Callaghan, associate professor of philosophy, on “Beyond Vision.”
“How we understand perception is being reshaped by attention to ‘other’ sensory modalities and to the extensive coordination and cooperation among our senses.”

–Melissa Marschall, professor of political science, on “Be Careful What You Wish For.”
“Building next-generation data systems and infrastructure is difficult. Yet sustaining them once built presents perhaps even bigger challenges. In this talk, I’ll share how my personal struggle with this challenge has caused me to rethink the future of social science research.”

–Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, on “Earth’s Thin Blue Line.”
“As the lightest of Earth’s layers, the atmosphere is exceptionally fragile yet vitally important to life as we know it. Slight perturbations to its composition can dramatically affect our health and climate.”

–Julie Fette, associate professor of French studies, on “Exclusion.”
“Since time immemorial, human beings have excluded other human beings from their communities, trades, social networks and lands because of differences in religion, nationality, gender, ethnicity and skin color. Why?”

Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. The lecture series provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows come from a wide range of academic disciplines. For more information on Scientia, visit http://scientia.rice.edu.